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Google Abused Its Power By Quashing a Report Critical Of Its Service, Reporter Says (gizmodo.com)
In the wake of claims that Google got a think-tank research team sacked for criticizing the company, a respected journalist is alleging other abuses by the search giant. Kashmir Hill, a reporter at Gizmodo, is claiming that when she worked for Forbes six years ago, Google told the the magazine's staff that if publishers didn't add the "+" Google Plus social network button at the bottom of stories, those articles would come up lower in search results. From her report: I published a story headlined, "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers," that included bits of conversation from the meeting. (An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.) Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. [...] Given that I'd gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down -- a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it -- and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory -- a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google's crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly.
Power is most easily apparent when it's being abused.
Oh the irony.
" I Criticized Google. It Got Me Fired. That's Corporate Power" Barry Lynn.. here is the story
http://m.ndtv.com/opinion/i-criticized-google-it-got-me-fired-thats-corporate-power-1744793
While everyone is up in arms about Google being evil I am a little on the wary side of this. Not because the story is untrue, but rather the implication that only Google is involved with attempting to influence rankings for search results. Everyone has been looking at gaming the system, companies regularly hired people to do just this. I admit that this is blatant but it is not like only Forbes could put the Google button on their page. They appeared to do it with anyone that was willing to participate.
The other issue I have with this piece is that from a story she did 6 years ago, did they change during this time or is still true? In this case I would like to see a little less complaining and a few more facts about the current state of the problem rather than a rehash of an old article.
Why wait 6 years to come out with this stuff?
Got an axe to grind with Google?
While the story doesn't seem very far fetched, the delay is highly suspect.
ANY organization becomes more evil, (from the standpoint of the average citizen), when it becomes bigger and/or more powerful. That 'and/or' qualifier I put there was intentional. Mozilla didn't have the kind of power that Google has, but after they reached a certain size their own internal power struggles, empire-building tendencies, and sheer hubris led to ignoring their users' needs and desires. As for Google, they are both very big and very powerful. "Might makes right" became a cliché for a very good reason, and Google is a fine example of this.
I've long argued that laissez-faire ought to apply to small businesses, with a sliding scale of progressively more government interference as a company gets larger. The catch-22 here is that government will become bigger and more powerful as a result, with the same consequences. So what we really need is an educated, thoughtful, politically engaged populace. But governments and corporations have that covered: schooling that teaches knee-jerk obedience to authority and frowns upon truly critical thinking, combined with bread and circuses and copious advertising, ensure that most people will take what they're given and do as they're told, even as they imagine themselves to be rebels.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Google told the the magazine's staff that if publishers didn't add the "+" Google Plus social network button at the bottom of stories, those articles would come up lower in search results.
They had to somehow "push" Google Plus down our throats. I would give some advice to Google if they want some traction.
Improve its interface. Have consumers continue to consume video content on the screen even while scrolling and consuming other material.
In other words, borrow a leaf from Facebook. They seem to be doing pretty well. Emulate the successful.
anyone still using the internet in 2017 is willfully giving their data directly to the NSA
Fixed that for you.
It's easy and painless to do without Google's search. I was skeptical that this was true myself, but I switched away (to DDG) and have found that my search results have actually improved.
Yes, my results have more "false positives" than Google, but the hits tend to much closer to what I was searching for than with Google.
My theory is that it's because Google's "personalization" absolutely ruins the quality of search results. At least, it seems that way, since Google's results started declining in quality when they started doing that, and have been getting worse every year.
I dunno. By my reading, A and B are saying precisely the same thing.
Hear me out because i'm trying to be objective about this.
Google has +1 buttons on a fuckload of pages and it indexes them all. The question is, how much additional computational power would it require to identify the few pages that are not fond of Google? Given all that power used, how much money would they be paying just to suppress a negative articles?
I don't know the numbers but it seems to me that it would be rather costly to correctly identify which pages to avoid putting a +1 button on. I get the creeping feeling it's more likely that they left an html tag open or something which resulted in eating the button and thus not being displayed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I am very glad that Bing has become so very friendly to Tor in the guise of Duck Duck Go.
Many searches that I test between Bing and Duck Duck Go are identical, and Bing is listed as a search provider for Duck Duck Go. I do not know if Microsoft is an investor in Duck Duck Go, but it would not surprise me.
Many harsh things could and have been said about Microsoft, but at this point they are the champions of anonymous search, and a far better corporate citizen in this regard than Google.
It has always been "Don't, be evil".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Orwell's 1984. If there were ever a more prescient book I can't identify it.
1984 should be required reading for our children. But soon, just like "Gone With the Wind", "1984" will be more and more banned in the public sphere.
Thought, initially not banned by your government, but by the Wizards of Silicon Valley. The ones who hide behind a digital curtain, leading you down a yellow brick road, and adorning you with stories of how you too can have a heart.
But as the curtain of "Do No Evil" devolves into "We Tell You What is Evil" even the most dense among us realize they live in chains.
Chains not denoted by iron and steel, but by plastic, silicon, and lithium.
It is incumbent upon good women and men, who believe in freedom of thought, to take a stand. For if they don't children who never read 1984 will live in 1984.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Why was it a reasonable presumption that the meeting was confidential? Did they say in the meeting that the content of the meeting would be confidential? Did Google ask Forbes to sign an NDA that purported to prevent either party from disclosing the illegal activities of the other party? (It's illegal to abuse your market position in one area to gain an advantage in another market.)
(A) implies something like that going into a hospital puts you in an environment where there are sick people, and so you might get sick. It's just what happens because you're breathing in air that they're trying to keep sterile because people are filling it with virulent pathogens.
(B) implies something like that the hospital despots are twirling their moustaches as they watch you sit in the waiting room, slowly leaning closer to the monitor. The smell of insurance money. They push the big red button, and the vent above you starts to cough out a combination of tuberculosis and influenza.
You use tone and specific words to manipulate emotional context. Use negative tones to convey that someone is being malicious, and positive tones to convey that someone has provided a helpful tool. (A) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and adding a Google+ share button raises you above baseline." (B) in this case impresses: "The baseline is X, and not adding a Google+ button pushes you below baseline." What the journalist wrote says Google penalizes you for not doing a thing, rather than that doing a thing allows Google to provide better results with better data gathering.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
The amended version, after their plant on the apple board stole the iphone idea
Another person clueless about history,
IBM did the first smartphone (touch screen phone with applications) in 1992, the 'multitouch' features of the iPhone were from the acquisition of FingerWorks in 2005 - a company that a variety of phone companies had been interested in.
The LG Prada had been released the year before to wide applause by industrial designers for its capacitive touch screen.
Samsung and Nokia both had touch screen smart phones, but were worried about cost, so hadn't released them yet, because they didn't think people would pay 'that much' for a phone.
So the 'iPhone idea' wasn't Apples idea at all and being on Apples board almost certainly didn't impact androids development. Apple simply provided the most refined version of the smartphone idea, one that was being simultaneously pursued by all major phone companies.
http://mashable.com/2012/11/09...
Do Know Evil
Yes, I agree with most of this. I have a little quibble, though...
If there's a +1 button on the bottom of the page, then you're getting a real content quality signal. Not everyone who likes the content will click, but no one who hates it will click.
If the goal is to find the highest quality content, the +1 button seems dubious. It's not measuring quality, it's measuring popularity. And it's a poor measure of popularity at that because of the heavy selection bias involved (most people aren't going to click it no matter how they feel about it.)
In other words, it's not really telling you much more than tracking who clicks on what links tells you. That this stuff figures so much in search rankings at all is probably part of why Google's search results have been getting worse.
You're correct that all the technology was already in place - but I'm pretty sure I remember reading that Google basically scrapped their existing Android interface and redesigned it from scratch after the iPhone came out.
Apple has never been anything close to a technological innovator, but it's dishonest not to give them credit for producing streamlined user-friendly interfaces that become the standard against which all others are measured. They never do anything new, but they do do user interfaces *right* - at least for the non-techy masses. And even as a techy that avoids Apple products, I appreciate the influence they've had on more capable interfaces.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's well known that Marissa Mayer came up with the slogan "Don't Be Evil".
When she left Google, she unfortunately only took the "Don't" with her. So Google was left with "Be Evil"; while "Don't" neatly summarizes her tenure at Yahoo.
#DeleteChrome
The difference is that the Left says, "surrender to us and we will provide". And the never provide.
The Right says, "here is a tool called capitalism. Employ it and you can succeed." And it usually does.
Well, there's this - showing a 2007 Android phone's interface versus that of a post-iPhone Android G1:
https://www.technobuffalo.com/...
#DeleteChrome
Moot point. The idea that a multi-billion dollar multi national corp can be completely controlled by a small group of leaders is just silly. Sure the CEO and board can steer the company in a given direction, but if some middle manager 10 steps removed from the c-levels decides to do something 'evil' (whatever that means) or at least morally questionable, they aren't going to find out until it hits the front page and lawyers are filing subpoenas.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!